brainrow

A little perspective, via A Blog Around The Clock:

From Boing Boing: Nemo has been found.

One more reason not to eat sushi.

I’m very skeptical about the recent “discovery” of the “tomb of Jesus”. The evidence seems worse than thin — more a fantasy than a discovery. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

The makers of a new TV documentary claim to have uncovered the biggest archaeological story of the century – the tomb of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. But several archaeologists and biblical scholars challenge the evidence. One calls it “much ado about nothing much.” …

If the evidence proved convincing, it would represent a challenge to the New Testament and the foundations of Christianity.

Really?

Catholic League President William Donohue thinks the claims are an assault on Christianity:

Not a Lenten season goes by without some author or TV program seeking to cast doubt on the divinity of Jesus and/or the Resurrection.

Brent Bozell’s conservative CNS News writes:

For Christians around the world, the claims in the documentary threaten the foundation of their faith system. If the documentary’s claims are true, the evidence undermines the core tenets of Christian faith, most notably that Jesus was resurrected three days after his crucifixion and later ascended into Heaven.

“As a born-again Christian, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is an immovable foundation of what I know is true,” Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families, said in a statement.

Does he really mean to say that the foundation of his faith is so feeble that the discovery an ancient tomb might cause the whole thing to collapse?

Please, take a few moments and read the Sermon on the Mount. Or take a little longer, and read all four Gospels.

Do the fundamentalists really believe the Sermon and all the teachings in the Gospels are worthless unless Jesus bodily ascended into the heavens? Is their faith truly so fragile?

Via Stranger Fruit: It seems to me you’d have to kinda know what you were doing to navigate this flight path.

In two blog entries (one and two) Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel discusses the difference between scientific and non-scientific thinking.

First, here’s the process that no one thinks is a good description of how to come to a scientific conclusion:

Believing something doesn’t make it so. Science is an endeavor that is not concerned with what a person believes about the world but instead with what one can establish about the world, usually on the basis of empirical evidence.

The second drawing is based on the late Sir Karl Popper’s philosophy of science.

Popper didn’t see the problem of induction — that inductive inferences drawn from limited data could go wrong — as something that could be “solved”. However, he thought that the methodology of science avoided the problem by not identifying conclusions arrived at through inductive inference as “knowledge” in the strong sense of “there is no way this could fail to be true”. Here’s Popper’s picture of the process of building scientific knowledge:

Notice that Popper doesn’t think it matters all that much where your hypothesis P comes from. Maybe it comes from lots of poking around and observing your phenomena. Maybe it comes from that recurring nightmare of the snake biting his own tail. It’s not important. The thing that can make P a respectable scientific claim is that it is tested in the right kind of way.

In an earlier discussion of Popper, Stemwedel wrote:

The big difference Popper identifies between science and pseudo-science is a difference in attitude. While a pseudo-science is set up to look for evidence that supports its claims, Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its claims and look for evidence that might prove it false. In other words, pseudo-science seeks confirmations and science seeks falsifications.

No wonder some politicians are at war with science. A big bag of hot air might not carry you very high if you keep looking for ways to poke holes in it.

I’m reading a programming book called Perl Best Practices. There’s some good stuff in it, though most of it is fairly technical. My favorite things are the short quotes that begin each chapter. Most of them are pretty nerdy, but a few of them speak to all of us:

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. –Charles Babbage

This is why everyone should learn at least a little bit of computer programming. There is no magic inside the computer, but it can certainly seem like magic until you get in and poke around a bit for yourself.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. –Erica Jong, How to Save Your Own Life

Advice is what you ignore when you already know the answer and think it might magically change.

Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction. –Albert Einstein

Haven’t you heard? That emboldens the other fools.

Thrilling Wonder has collected some interesting signs. (They have more here and here.)

Also at Thrilling Wonder, a sequence of photos shows one way you might be cheated out of your card and your secret PIN code at an automated teller machine (ATM). Be careful out there.

Does it ever end?

At times, it seems the world’s supply of ignorance and pettiness is inexhaustible:

Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.

“I sensed the disrespect with which this was to be carried out and got fed up,” Ms. Holloway added. “I didn’t have room in my life for these women to come in and tell my sisters of three years that they weren’t needed.”

At times, we find ourselves once again in old battles we thought had been fought and won years ago.

This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.

Are we in a rut?

The trouble is that prejudice and ignorance and pettiness are not enemies that can be overthrown once and for all. They are like stones that must be eroded over a long, long time — worn down, and worn down, and worn away, slowly, steadily, ceaselessly, by every breath we take.

It never ends.

Via Crooks and Liars, Conan O’Brien shows us Meet the Press for Idiots:

Have you ever had a creepy feeling that you were being watched? From Living the Scientific Life: the Helix Nebula.

And, from the New York Times, this completely unrelated article:

Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun?

Compelling answers are beginning to emerge from biologists and computer scientists who are gaining new insights into how the brain recognizes and processes facial data.

Long before she had heard of Diana Duyser’s grilled-cheese sandwich, Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, had an inkling that people might process faces differently from other objects. Her suspicion was that a particular area of the brain gives faces priority, like an airline offering first-class passengers expedited boarding.

“Some patients have strokes and are then able to recognize everything perfectly well except for faces,” Dr. Tsao said. “So we started questioning whether there really might be an area in the brain that is dedicated to face recognition.”

More here.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, by carefully inspecting every bite of food in order to make sure it wasn’t Jesus or somebody, I was eating a lot less and finally losing some weight. On the other hand, I feel more relaxed now without that creepy eye spying on me all the time.

Today is also the 198th birthday of Charles Darwin. (Links to many Darwin Day posts here.)

From ScienceBlogs:

For scientists, the human fascination of Darwin’s life is only part of the picture. He is also admired because he was a scientist’s scientist — a role model for the ages. He had a keen insight into the way that nature worked, and he was able to use his observations to formulate hypotheses. He was also a very careful and methodical scientist. In the years between when he first formulated his evolutionary hypothesis and when he (reluctantly) published it, he conducted experiment after experiment, looking at different aspects of life. He bred pigeons to study how selection could result in changes in offspring. He spent years dissecting barnacles and observing the similarities and differences within and among species. He (with some help from his son and butler) soaked seeds in a tub of saltwater for months at a time to study dispersal. He gathered information from a web of collaborators that spanned the world, on a range of topics that covered a great deal of the science of biology. Darwin’s combination of insight and patience is what makes him a role model for scientists, and it’s one of the reasons that most of us have such great respect for him.

Darwin’s importance is only growing:

In his own way, Darwin emancipated the sciences. By producing a coherent theory that unified biology, he established biology as a theoretically sound and intellectually exciting science. Lawrence Summers … is right to say that “If the 20th century was defined by developments in the physical sciences, the 21st century will be defined by developments in the life sciences.” It will be Darwin’s century, a century in which his ideas will be the strong bedrock on which great inventions are built.

The Creator sure was busy 198 years ago today, and He did some of His best work then, too.

Part of the legend of King Arthur says that Arthur is not dead, but only sleeping under a hill in Avalon, waiting to return in England’s hour of greatest need. It’s a myth, of course. Arthur himself is at least half myth.

Today is the 198th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, and I can’t help thinking that this country sure could use him now.

Of course, Lincoln can’t return to save us from our current troubles, any more than Washington or Jefferson could solve the troubles of Lincoln’s own day. “It is for us, the living,” and it always has been.

We will not be saved unless we save ourselves.

On the PBS NewsHour tonight, essayist Julia Keller said of this portrait, “It is less of a face, maybe, than a soul, worn inside out.”

Lincoln is a source of comfort and encouragement in our hour of need. He was a mortal, fallible human being, like ourselves. He showed us just what a mortal, fallible human being can do. His life challenges every one of us to do better.

St. Augustine was ahead of his time. Why, he might have been talking about “intelligent design” here:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

(I’ve broken the quote into shorter paragraphs.)

Via Boing Boing: corporate and commercial jets leaving the Super Bowl, based on air traffic control radar.

Do you suppose the shareholders of the corporations paying for those corporate jets feel they’re getting a good return on that investment?

From Animal Planet, a trained bird named Einstein:

I saw this yesterday on another blog, but now I can’t find the place where I found it.